The first album by Sara Chenal and Jean-Pierre Ferey was devoted to French women composers (Violon au féminin, Skarbo, 2015); it gave a prominent place to relatively short-form genre pieces from the 19th and 20th centuries. For this new recording, they wanted to retain the same spirit of discovery that animated that first project, while exploring more developed and also more contemporary forms of the French repertoire.
Looking at the repertoire of sonatas written for the violin, the first name they agreed on was Francis Poulenc. His modernity, though rooted in tradition, is undoubtedly more apparent today than it was thirty years ago. Yet his Sonata for violin and piano has been relatively little performed until recently. This is no doubt due to the difficulty of performing it.
Recently, they have been working with Florentine Mulsant, contemporary composer, participating in several recordings of her works. Captivated by the lyricism and the lightness of her Rhapsody, they decided to record it.
Until Aubert Lemeland death in 2010, Jean-Pierre Ferey worked for more than thirty years with him, premiering and recording many of his piano pieces and providing artistic direction for most of his orchestral recordings. At the end of 2009, Ferey commissioned him to write a work for flute and piano for the great Korean flautist Soyoung Lee, here recorded in a version for violin and piano.
Consulting various documents at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Jean-Pierre Ferey discovered Elsa Barraine's Suite Juive. This Suite, with its three contrasting movements, makes use of melody and personal harmony. It seemed to the interprets a fine complement to the preceding works, thus
constituting a panorama of four works that are very different from one another, but can nevertheless all be linked in one way or another to the French heritage.
